4 Ways to Use It in Social Media

You’ve been drinking Coca-Cola your whole life. You drink it when you’re bored; you drink it at McDonald’s, you drink it with your friends, you drink it when you’re having pizza, you drank it when you saw the Avengers – EndGame recently. Coca-Cola completes an experience for you, and that makes it special. Now, as a marketer for Pepsi, I would like you to give Pepsi a try. You’ve never considered it till now because you love Coca-Cola. Now imagine Pepsi signs up Captain America a.k.a. Chris Evans as their ambassador. Next thing you know, you’re getting a video message from Cap himself asking you to try the new Pepsi. Wouldn’t you give it a shot now? Now you see why I say that personalized video marketing represents the future of marketing.

According to Seth Godin, marketing is about changing the habits of your audience communicating with them. Pretty simple right? As a marketer, you need to understand how to connect and convey the right message. Your campaigns need to drive a change in a particular habit. If you’re used to going to the grocery store, try Amazon. If you’re used to renting movies at Blockbuster, try Netflix. Every campaign you carry out needs to drive a change in behavior. For those campaigns to succeed, you need to ensure that you’ve got the right tools.

There was a time when content was king. The written blog was the word of god. Hubspot cashed in on this killing it with content. They called it ‘Inbound Marketing,’ and businesses loved it. Many companies have adopted this inbound content strategy to drive traction. As these numbers grew, the ROI started reducing eventually. With every strategy, the law of diminishing returns eventually catches on. It has finally caught on with content marketing ROI.

Spray and Pray. That’s the mantra there. More than 2 million blogs are written per day. It is becoming a daunting task for businesses to leverage their blogs anymore. Communicating with the masses has its problems. You expect your readers to have a deeper connection with your brand to adopt it just reading your content eventually. But, the present day audience expects more. They expect businesses to understand their needs. They want to develop a great relationship with your brand. It has been challenging to create these experiences at scale until the rise of personalized video marketing.

What is Personalized Video Marketing?

For long marketing has taken care of broadcasting a message. This was effective for branding purposes. Primarily, the sales team used to have a personal connection with the customers. This was before the rise of social media.

Social media bridged the gap between the brand and the customer. Brands started interacting directly with customers through their social media handles. The connect was conversational. From just broadcasting messages for the audience, brands moved to interacting with people at a personal level. Personalized video marketing was born.

With the rise of technology, social media tools have become smarter. There are tools now to follow people, DM, like, and retweet the tweets. People have come to know of these tricks, and these tricks no longer work in fostering a relationship. The need of the hour is to have a medium that is authentic and can be personalized at scale too.

The Rise of Personalized Videos

Forbes recently hailed personalized videos as the next marketing breakthrough. It is about building relationships. Quickly. Using a video and adding granular details about the person you’re connecting with, expedites the process of building a relationship. Videos have proven to be an engaging medium. Adding personalized content to them creates an intimate experience for the recipient. They feel special that the brand has taken its time to understand them. It’s all about creating the wow experience.

So now that you know what personalized videos are let’s check out a few ways you can leverage that.

Personalized Video Marketing Campaigns

Facebook started the trend way back in 2014 with its ‘Look back’ videos. It has only gotten better from then on. With ‘Your year in review’ to ‘You have been friends’ Facebook has lead the charge for personalized videos. These videos really seem to connect with the masses as its personalized to them. The content is only about them and speaks directly to them. So how can brands use personalized videos to connect with their users?

Let’s say you ran a campaign for the recently concluded Mothers Day. Search for #mothersday on Twitter. Figure out the people you would like to connect with your brand. Take a few pictures from their social profiles. Add them to a video template that you have created for them with placeholders. You can use Hippo Video to create mass-personalized videos. Reply via your Twitter handle using these personalized videos. This is an effective way to show that you care about them.

Personalized Sales Videos

Sales has always relied on building personal relationships. Great sales leaders are not the ones who have the perfect pitch to close every deal; they have the right attitude to build relationships. Often these relationships are long term. To build these long-lasting relationships, you need to build trust. Building trust takes time. You need to spend time getting to know your prospect, their likes, and dislikes.

Social media can really short this for sales. Check out the prospects social media presence, and you’ll get a fair idea of who they are and what their personality is. Instagram and Facebook can give you their likes and dislikes. LinkedIn can show you how well they’re doing professionally. Use that for sales. If your prospect has recently got an award or won some recognition, quickly record a video and send it across. Video humanizes you and shows that you truly appreciate them. Moments like these help cement the connect you’re trying to establish.

You can also create short videos to get a prospective account’s attention. LeadIQ does it brilliantly. They create these short pitch videos for their target accounts and post them on LinkedIn. They recently did one for Invision App – A collaborative platform for the tech, design, and marketing folks. Really cool way of saying that they love InvisionApp to the whole world. This took prospecting to a whole new level.

Videos Help in Prospecting

Hyper-Target Multiple Segments

Facebook gives you the freedom to run multiple campaigns at the same time. For the same product, you can run multiple campaigns targeting different segments. This gives you the ability to personalize your message for a specific audience. This way, your message is well received instead of just being irrelevant through the power of personalized video marketing.

A simple example can showcase how it works. Consider the water department of the USA wanted to run a campaign highlighting the need to conserve water this summer. The central theme would be the drying up of local lakes and that citizens have to raise their hands to reverse the situation. The need of the hour is to reduce usage and increase adoption of rainwater harvesting techniques. The impact of this campaign would increase if the people connected with the message. A citizen living in Delaware would not care much about lakes drying up in California. If you critically mention that the water level in Moores Lake – Delaware has been consistently reducing over the years, the citizen from Delaware will take notice. It is up to the marketers to craft these messages to drive the point home. Broadcasting the same message to the entire audience doesn’t seem to work anymore.

Remarketing with Personalized Video Marketing

Remarketing is a classic example of a process that inspires brand recall. Traditionally, companies have been using ads and landing pages to trigger a recall.

According to Criteo, videos have an 80% brand recall. If the visitor visits your page and doesn’t convert, remarketing takes over. Instead of sending a text-based landing page, send a personalized video. The video format is so powerful that the user starts to engage instantly if the content is excellent. If the content is personalized based on user demographics, the traction increases manifold.

Personalized remarketing videos is a great way to connect and increase the conversions. It is up to the marketers to craft exceptional video experiences for their users. Getting the elements right to personalize a video template is critical. Care must be taken to not overly personalize though. The video created should not come off as creepy. 80-20 rule is the way to go here. 80% of the video should have the standard message while personalizing just 20% of it.

It’s a Wrap

Personalized video marketing is the future of marketing. They give the personal touch that is necessary while doing it at scale. All this through a truly engaging format, i.e., videos. We took you through the evolution of personalized videos and how personalized videos can be used in your business. The examples are some of the ways we have done it. Have you tried personalized videos yet? What results have you got? Do share your experiences in the comments below. Until next time.

Nikhil Premanandan is an expert on Video Marketing. Nikhil is the head of marketing currently at Hippo Video, a video personalization, and distribution platform. He likes to experiment with videos consistently and document his experiences in his blogs. When he’s not working you can find him digging through the latest exploits of Tom Hanks and Steve Carell.